LAWYER PROFILES NATALIE SUMTER
Excerpted from The Post and Courier
Nov. 25, 2001

CHARLESTON -- In the winter of 1994, ensconced in a cozy study of a grand house in Sweden, Charleston lawyer Thomas Tisdale began to assemble and shape a biography of a French noblewoman -- and ancestor -- whose life was lived on three continents. A woman, it should be added, who was present at some of the most momentous events in the formative history of the United States.

Nathalie de Lage de Volude was 11 years old when she fled Paris in September 1793, at the height of the French Revolution. Born in the palace of Versailles, she was the godchild of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. She would become a significant figure in South Carolina plantation society, though her marriage to Thomas Sumter Jr. would involve a distinct change of perspectives.

"A Lady of the High Hills," Tisdale's first book, chronicles the life of Natalie Delage Sumter from her birth at court to her death in 1841 in the South Carolina Upcountry.

"She was a woman who lived life to the fullest, who participated to the fullest, and made great contributions to the community wherever she went -- in France, in New York, in South Carolina," Tisdale said. "Her treatment of the slaves on her plantation and her role in the Roman Catholic Church in South Carolina were important.

"The variety of her life gives people interested in the time in which she lived a whole different view of what happened."

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